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Eric Halsey, "State Builders from the Steppe: A History of The First Bulgarian Empire" (This is RETHINK, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:08]
B
Hello and welcome to Nomads Past and Present, a podcast about nomadism and nomadic peoples around the world and throughout history. I'm your host, Maggie Freeman, and my guest today is Eric Halsey. Eric holds degrees in history and political science from the University of Mary Washington and in nationalism studies from Central European University. Since 2013, he's been living in Bulgaria and creating the Bulgarian History Podcast, all about the history of Bulgaria from the 7th century to the present day. He recently published his first book, State Builders from the A History of the First Bulgarian Empire, covering how the proto Bulgarians built an identity that lasts to this very day. And that is what we'll be talking about. So thank you so much, Eric, for joining me.
- [01:55]
C
Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to chat about the book.
- [01:59]
B
So before we get into talking about the book itself, I just wanted to ask you how your interest in Bulgarian, Bulgarian history developed. Developed. You know, you make a point of saying that you're not from Bulgaria, you don't have Bulgarian ancestry, you have no kind of personal ties that would have brought you to Bulgaria or to working on this part of the world in the first place. So how did that come about?
- [02:29]
C
So just kind of dumb luck, you know, I. I'm from Washington, D.C. originally. I grew up in, like, The Northern Virginia suburbs. So growing up, I had a lot of friends from all over the world and a lot of friends with parents working in, like, department and stuff, so friends who would move around and stuff like that. And when I was in high school, my first girlfriend was an American, but whose mother was a NATO Air Force officer, and they had just returned to the US from living here in Sofia for three years on a NATO assignment. And so, you know, she told me all about what it was like living in Bulgaria, and she introduced me to some of her friends via AOL Instant messenger, as was. As was the way to do.
- [03:06]
B
This is a throwback.
- [03:07]
C
This is what, like 2005, 2006. And so I got to know some of her Bulgarian friends. And that year, for Christmas, she gave me a book I have right here, which is a kind of. It's called Crown of Thorns. It's a biography of Tsar Boris iii, so kind of the ruler of Bulgaria during the interwar years. And, you know, I was already interested in history, and it was just so fascinating to me that Bulgaria's experience was just radically different than any other kind of broad European history. I had read about that. You know, there are these, like, radical agrarian move and the Macedonian movements, and it was. It just grabbed my attention. And as I, you know, went to university as, you know, as a PhD student, I'm sure it's like you need to find your niche and you don't want to just work on something that a million people have worked on, and you're going to be the thousandth person to write about, like, D Day or something. And for me, you know, the more I looked into it, the more I was like, okay, there's a. Not much out there about Bulgaria. Academic literature, less academic literature, just not much out there. And so it felt like a place where, okay, I can really have an impact here. I could contribute to this space. And then in college, I found out that there's an American university in Bulgaria, US Accredited. So I kind of set that up as a study abroad thing. Our universities had never heard of each other. It was my design, the whole thing. And I just went for a year in 2009, 2010, and I kind of was like, yes, I like this place. I like this history. And, yeah, and so that's where it kind of came from. It's just a kind of coincidence. I happened to. To meet this girl who had just lived here, who told me about it, and it kind of ignited this spark. And here I am today.
- [04:42]
B
Wow. So fortuitous. So your podcast covers all kind of periods of Bulgarian history. So why did you decide to write your book about the first Bulgarian Empire, specifically out of all of those kind of periods of Bulgarian history that you cover, that you know about, that you could have written about?
- [05:06]
C
Yeah, I mean, a part of me. A part of it is just kind of starting from the beginning. I mean, there is. And I'll talk about there's older Bulgarian history, but, you know, the first Bulgarian Empire is the first time that we know enough to really write a whole book about it. You know, the stuff before, we just have little fragments, and there's just not much there. So a part of it is just, why not start from the beginning? But also, in particular, it felt like this was a place where there really should be a book like this, because, you know, there's a number of books in English about the first Bulgarian Empire, and they're all either academic books that are, you know, quite expensive, not really accessible and written specifically for other historians, or they're for a general public, but, like, they might contribute, like, 10 pages to the first Bulgarian Empire. It's just a very, very brief overview. And the only other book that's a kind of complete history of that state written in English, was published in 1930. And it's a wonderful book, but it's been a minute. And so to me, it was like, okay, this is a place where, like, this book needs to exist. We need an updated kind of complete history that's kind of a little more accessible. And so I wanted to kind of start there.
- [06:14]
B
And so, given this lack of general knowledge about the first Bulgarian Empire, can you give listeners kind of the gist of what they need to know about it? You know, what period in history are we talking about? What are the kind of particularities of the history of the first Bulgarian Empire that listeners need to know to kind of understand what it is we're talking about here?
- [06:38]
C
So it's kind of. It kicks off when you have this state called Old Great Bulgaria that exists kind of in what's now Ukraine and Crimea, and it's up there. And then one of these nomadic groups, the Khazars, you know, comes from behind and kind of smashes it and it breaks apart. And all these little groups, Bulgars, flee out in all kind of directions. Like, one goes up to the upper reaches of the Volga and forms a Volga Bulgaria, which exists until the Middle Ages, eventually converts to Islam. Another group goes into Italy, where there's still some kind of remnants of those. There's some place names and things connected to them. Another goes to Macedonia, another goes to the Pannonian plain, which is now kind of Hungary. And the main one comes down to the Danube and enters Byzantine territory, fights a battle, wins, and kind of establishes a state. And so this is 681, and they last about three and a half centuries. And in that time, they. It's. The story is really the transformation from kind of like what you have with a lot of step peoples that migrate into Europe initially. You know, it's this step elite that rules over a larger group of, you know, like settled peoples. And oftentimes, you know, the two don't really merge too much. And by the time that steppe elite is. That state is defeated, they kind of vanish. But in the history of the Bulgars, it's essentially this battle, internal struggle with how are we going? Like, are we going to change? Are we going to remain the step elite, or are we going to kind of merge with the people living here and adapt our stepways and kind of lose a lot of that and transition into a kind of classic settled empire with the Byzantines being their big neighbor and the big model for that transformation? And so it's kind of three and a half centuries of gradually navigating this, eventually converting to Christianity, eventually, you know, kind of creating a different kind of structure of the state and eventually really changing their culture, their language, their religion. Almost everything changes. And there's civil wars, there's assassinations, there's a lot of blood spilled fighting over whether or not those changes will be allowed to happen. But over the course of that process, you know, they create this idea of a Bulgarian state, and, you know, that's lasted 13 centuries later till today. They created the Cyrillic Alphabet, which is used by about 250 to 300 million people around the world, which quite. I always say it's ironic that the biggest achievement of the Bulgarian, first Bulgarian state, no one knows it's from them. Everyone assumes it's Russian or something, but, you know, they converted to Orthodox Christianity and really set that as the kind of blueprint, because it's about a century before the Kievan Rus converts to Christianity. They're kind of. I mean, it's a little ambiguous, but like the first major Slavic state to really convert to Orthodox Christianity. And it kind of set that as the path for a lot of the southern Eastern Slavs. But they also created the language of what's the brain fart here, but old church Slavonic, which becomes also the kind of prototypical language for Eastern Orthodoxy. They all also fight A lot with the Hungarians, and a lot of people don't know this, but a battle and some fights between them are the reason the Hungarians eventually moved and settled into the Pannonian plain. And so in my mind, the reason Hungary is where it is today is basically because of these fights with the proto Bulgarian Empire. And of course, they played a huge role in Byzantine history. I mean, they were allies and enemies. And allies and enemies. The Bulgarians helped to kind of basically defeat the first ever Arab invasion of Europe, where they tried to besiege Constantinople. I could go on, but I need to cut myself off here. But so you think of this transformation from a step people to a kind of settled empire, but also to a Christian state, but also to a kind of formal, medieval hierarchical state.
- [10:32]
B
Yeah, it's so interesting just to learn about this history because I come from a background in, like, Islamic studies history of the medieval Middle east, so I'm more familiar with the Volga Bulgars. But you said, you know, the Danube Bulgars are like the main Bulgars. But even so, most people really don't know this history that you're talking about. Even people who, you know, are, I think, well versed in, like, European history. I think you're right that this story has been very sort of marginalized.
- [11:11]
C
Yeah. Because it's always bothering you, living in modern Bulgaria for so long. A lot of people see Bulgaria as just this kind of. Yeah, very marginal. Like some small, insignificant little state in the corner of Europe. But to me, you know, the story I tell in this book shows that. No, no, they've been fundamental. You know, they used to share a border with the Empire of Charlemagne and fought wars with them and interact. You know, they've been around for, you know, over 15 centuries that we have records of them and, you know, possible records even earlier than that, that the. The Bulgars have kind of been in Europe. And, you know, I would argue a lot of the things that they did were really definitional things that helped define European history. And so a part of this book is just making the argument that, hey, you know, Bulgaria is actually an important place with an important history that's worthy of kind of respect and greater knowledge and understanding.
- [11:59]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And so you said that the kind of. One of the central concerns of the first Bulgarian Empire was this question of to what extent do we continue our kind of step elite identity in this new and very different context. So can you talk a little bit more about what that original identity looks like? You know, who are the people who founded the First Bulgarian Empire before they get to that region.
- [12:41]
C
So, you know, when you have, you know, when they first kind of come down across the Danube, you know, they're ruled by a khan, and they have this. This kind of elite known as the boyars eventually, but, you know, the kind of elite aristocrats. And initially, you know, that's the state, the khan with his boyars. And they rule over mostly a lot of Slavs, some Greeks and Thracians and some various people living around the area, some Vloks, but that's the structure. And those boyars have an expectation that the khan will lead them to successful wars and raiding and things like that, so they can, you know, take slaves and loot and treasure and all this kind of stuff. And that's, I mean, you know, that's the kind of basis of a lot of the steppe empires, this kind of understanding that the. The state's purpose is to facilitate this kind of raiding, this like, taking of loot things and accumulating of wealth. But, you know, this is kind of a fragile state of affairs. And particularly being so close to the Byzantines fighting with them, it eventually becomes very clear to the khans or the leaders of the first Bulgarian empire that this structure is not as ideal for the place where they are living and for the neighborhood that they're living in. And that if they're going to really survive and thrive in the Balkans, because, you know, there are. There are flat areas of the Balkans, but for the most part, you know, its reputation is very warranted, having lived here for a long time. There's mountains everywhere. I mean, Bulgaria is like the size of Tennessee. It has five, arguably more, depending on, you define them, different mountain ranges. It's crazy how many mountains there are. And so, yeah, they're kind of trying. So eventually the khans are the ones really arguing that actually we should first allow the Slavs the greater portion of this kind of settled people living in their country into the aristocracy. We should kind of eliminate that harsh division between us, the proto Bulgarian elite, and them, the Slavs that we rule over. And by doing so, you know, we'll strengthen the state. We'll get more access to the Slav's leadership and resources and all these kinds of things. You know, initially the army is, you know, Slavic infantry, proto Bulgarian cavalry, all this kind of stuff. But, you know, the boyars push back and they murder, exile, overthrow, lead rebellions against many, many khans over the course of this, as they fight these changes. And eventually, you know, little by little, the khans and Then later knyaz and later tsars, they kind of receive Byzantine titles by forcing the Byzantines to give them to them. Eventually they slowly win out over the boyars that are kind of resisting these changes. And as I said, they. They allow Slavs into. Into the elite. And we know this because we start to see Slavic names popping up in kind of high positions. And they start to. Eventually a few people start adopting Christianity, and then eventually Christianity becomes a state religion, and they start to use Byzantine Greek as a written form of writing and a way to kind of, you know, manage the state more effectively. They start to build capital cities that are more made of stone and less of wood and just all these various things. They just start to little by little by little, you know, transition into what we would think of as a classic kind of medieval European state. And again, yeah, it is resisted at every single step of the way by these boyar elites, for the most part.
- [16:00]
B
So what's the primary subsistence method in this region? Is it primarily agricultural at this point in time? Because you were talking about the landscape of Bulgaria not being this kind of typical steppe landscape, but pastoralism is possible in mountainous regions. Right. So that sort of brings the question to my mind. Could the elites of the proto Bulgarian Empire have continued some dimensions, some form of pastoralism, despite this very kind of different ecology and landscape, or was there already just kind of like, well established methods of, like, food production and subsistence that they kind of adopted or assimilated instead?
- [16:51]
C
So, yeah, the Slavs were living a lot in the countryside and were growing, you know, wheat and millet and all these kind of classic things you'd expect from the region. And, you know, there were Vloc, particularly pastoralists, in the region when they arrived. And, you know, throughout the history, you always had these things acting together. You know, there are always pastoralists, and, you know, there are today people moving their sheep and goats and horses and things up into the mountains. And to this day, if you go up into the Bulgarian mountains, you'll occasionally see groups of horses and sheep and goats and things, sometimes with a herder with them, sometimes just on their own. And so you always had this kind of blend. But yeah, I think the big shift was the elite going from, you know, these kind of horse warriors, right, living in and around the capital city, to, you know, people living formally in the city as just sort of like settled elites close to the khans and then later the tsars, although. So with time, the state did become a little bit more decentralized, and you had some of those Elites that lived in kind of fortresses around the area, and they would kind of exert local control from those fortresses and things like that. But that's towards the end.
- [18:05]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. So do we see any kind of legacies of these nomadic pastoralist steppe origins as the state evolves? Are there any kind of lingering practices in terms of political practices, cultural, religious, anything like that?
- [18:27]
C
So it's one of the remarkable things. No, the kind of elements of that nomadic step, pastoralist background are almost completely gone. I mean, if you look at the modern Bulgarian language, you can count the number of words that trace back to proto Bulgarian on one hand. I think it's about five or so words. If you look at place names, there's a couple rivers and some things around the country with names that trace back, but very, very few. There are pre Christian cultural practices, things like the Surva, you know, this kind of thing where in the spring you're like scaring away evil spirits from the winter and things like that. You have the Nestanari fire walkers. But none of them I'm aware of tracing back to the proto Bulgarians, you know, so the religion gone, the language gone. Generally, most of the kind of cultural practices, I'm not aware of any that really exist to this day. It's. I mean, if I would think of like today, what you have, it's. It's a few symbols. It's maybe like a mythos like that, but those are very modern things, that these things have been discovered by archaeologists and historians and researchers, and some people in Bulgaria kind of take those to heart and try to kind of emulate those things to be like their ancestors in some way. But really it was a very complete transformation. And that there's so little left, which is in part which makes it so difficult to really learn about the proto Bulgarians and who they were, because we just don't have that much information. I mean, in the back of my book, I've got a list of all the places you can go to see any physical remnants of the first Bulgarian empire at all. I don't know, it's probably like eight places. Like, there's just. There's a few museums, there's a few archaeological sites, but there's just not a lot of physical evidence left over. There's not a lot of legacy from that far back, really.
- [20:21]
B
I mean, that's. Yeah, that's interesting, but not surprising. I think, like, if you look at the Mongol Empire and the kind of Mongol successor states, I think you see a very similar phenomenon. Of this just kind of total transformation away from the original kind of Mongol, nomadic, pastoralist, steppe identity and practices into, like, assimilating the kind of local culture and practices and languages and identity and everything.
- [20:55]
C
Yeah, and I think even the close example is Hungary. You know, I lived there for a year getting my master's degree, and I think it's a very similar situation that the Hungarians will sort of, you know, build monuments to their step ancestors. But, you know, my understanding is genetic evidence shows there's nearly no genetic traces, that they're, you know, that the. All that stuff has pretty much faded into. Into. Into nothingness. And it's mostly just through kind of modern historical and cultural practices that they consciously kind of tie back to that.
- [21:26]
B
And so what are the sources that you used to write this book? You know, this is a question that I think has come up in just about every single. That I've done for this podcast that, you know, it's just sort of an unfortunate reality that practices of nomadic pastoralism don't lend themselves to this kind of preservation of written documents, the creation and preservation of, like you said, kind of physical sites that remain into the present that can be studied and used by the historian. So what were some of the sources that you drew on for this?
- [22:08]
C
Yeah, so some, you know, archaeological texts and things. Certainly there are fortunately, a fair number of primary sources. You know, mostly translations of Byzantine chronicles, a few Armenian chronicles and things like that. We don't really have almost anything from the first Bulgarian Empire itself. Some letters later on. I love the story of when the proto Bulgarians were. Or, sorry, when the Bulgarians by that point were looking to convert to Christianity. There was a big debate whether to convert to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. And there's letters to and from the. The Bulgarian prince to the Pope asking him various questions about, like, so how does this thing work? And the, The. The questions are hilariously specific. Just like, can I eat meat on Sundays? When am I allowed to have sex? When it, like, you imagine this guy who's just, you know, very new to this thing, like, all right, but what are the rules? Tell me, tell me what I'm allowed to do, what I'm not allowed to do. But, you know, there's some stuff like that. But for the most part, it's mostly people writing about them and obviously plenty of secondary sources in English and in Bulgarian. But one thing that I've always really emphasized in my podcast and in this book is just being completely honest about when we don't know things. You know, just sometimes saying yeah, we've got some sources that kind of indicate this, but those are a little bit dubious. So maybe it was like this, maybe it wasn't. I think in Bulgarian historiography, there's real fear of that. There's this, I think, partially from the Communist legacy, the sense of, like, no, no, no, no. You must simply say, this is how it was. This is the received truth. And there's not a lot of gray and nuance in those kinds of sources. And so to me, you know, it's important to push back a little bit on that and just say, like, we're just not sure about a huge number of things and kind of. Kind of gotta accept that that's probably how it's going to be forever. A lot of the big mysteries of this stage will never really be solved.
- [24:00]
B
Yeah. I mean, but that's just the reality of writing so much kind of late antique, early medieval history, is that you're constructing this story around the holes, and the holes are often bigger than, like, the words that we do have, you know, the information that does remain.
- [24:21]
C
Yeah. And particularly because the vast majority of the sources on the first Bulgarian Empire are Byzantine ones, because they were right there. And I always remember, particularly when I was working on the podcast, but it came in this book as well, that you just get to one period where there's 40 years where just we don't know a single solitary thing about what happened, because there was no conflict with the Byzantines. So no one in the Byzantine Empire was writing about the Bulgars, and we don't have any other sources. And so it's just 40 years. I guess things were fine. It's a little funny to just skip over four decades like that, but that's the reality.
- [24:54]
B
And so what's the kind of impression of the Bulgars that's given in these? You meant, you said Byzantine and Armenian chronicles. Is it largely a kind of pejorative one if they were enemies or what is that? Like, what image of the Bulgars?
- [25:07]
C
Are they giving very much a pejorative one? Yeah, like, I'm trying to remember the exact. There's a quote from maybe Theophanes the Confessor just called them, like a foul, unclean tribe. I mean, there's language like that less as it goes along. But, you know, even when they converted to Christianity, the Byzantines really didn't like them very much and were, you know, the fact was, okay, the Proto Bulgarians stepped in and created a new state on what had been Byzantine territory, and they were the first state that the Byzantines ever recognized on their own former territory. And so, you know, for the Byzantines, this was a bit insulting as a, you know, a kind of jab at their ability to exert control in what they considered to be long core territory. I mean, you know, the territory that Bulgaria controlled for the most part, like south of the Danube, had been part of the Roman Empire for a very, very, very long time prior to that. And so, yeah, they were. They were not very happy. And a lot of this, you know, the. Was the story of the Bulgarians trying to get kind of legitimacy from the Byzantines. And in particular, that came a lot to titles. You know, in Bulgaria, it's a bit controversial, what I call the book, because some people don't like referring to the state as an empire. In Bulgarian, it would be tsarsvo, like a tsardom. But, you know, to me, you know, in English, you could say like tsardom or something. Sometimes tsardom is translated as kingdom. You know, when Bulgaria had a TSAR in the 20th century, it was always translated in English as kingdom. But here, you know, gaining Byzantine imperial titles was a fundamental mission of Bulgarian rulers for decades and decades and decades, because, you know, it brings a tremendous amount of legitimacy. You know, when you're trying to build a state from nothing and make that transition from a step empire that everyone in Europe looks on as, like, who are you people? Like, you're just some. You just showed up here and made this little state to. No, no, no, no. We are established. We have history, and we have these formal titles that everyone in the Middle Ages takes very seriously. And so, to me, the fact that Bulgarian leaders were eventually able to receive the title of emperor from the Byzantines was a major geopolitical win for them. And in my mind, it's also part of the reason why later states, the Second Bulgarian Empire, for example, kept coming back. Because, you know, if you think about it, it was basically these brothers, the Asen brothers, that founded the Second Bulgarian Empire about a century and a half after the first one was destroyed. And they could have called this new state anything. You know, the. The. The peoples that lived there. There were a lot of kind of cumans and pechenegs and things, not just Bulgars. You know, they could have called it the Asan Empire or something, but they very much went back to, this is a Bulgarian empire, I think, in part because by calling it that, that meant they could. They'll just pluck that title of emperor of the Bulgarians from history and take it for themselves and boom, you know, Skip all the other steps. Now, immediately you can kind of have this grand Byzantine imperial title that forces people to take you seriously. It didn't always work. Famously, the Crusaders did not take them seriously and paid very dearly for that mistake. But that's a whole other story.
- [28:17]
B
You answered two of my questions that I had, which one was about the designation of empire, and the other was, you know, if we're calling it the First Bulgarian Empire, that implies that there was a second. And so you answered those. But I was also hoping you could talk a bit about sort of what brought about the end of the First Bulgarian Empire, Sort of what were those circumstances?
- [28:46]
C
Yeah. So first, I will say that I think it's worth maybe, if you were going to ask about it anyways, going a little more detail about those other two points that, you know, there's two ways you can kind of define an empire, right? It can be based on the fact that the leader of that state has the title of emperor, therefore it kind of de facto becomes an empire, or that it controls a bunch of different people groups and is kind of large and expansive. And so, you know, I wrote a whole blog post kind of justifying this because, yeah, a lot of Bulgarians saw the title by book and immediately labeled me some, like, nationalist and like, oh, you're just trying to do. And I'm like, no, no, no, There's. I think there's legitimate historical reasons to say this. And so I kind of made that argument that they kind of qualified for both those, but mostly the fact of the title. And then, yeah, there was a second Bulgarian Empire, lasted much shorter, was defeated by the Ottomans. But it's also a very kind of dramatic story. It had this. I mean, that's the place where you can still go to Velikota Novo in central Bulgaria today and see this grand kind of. It's this fortress city on a bend of a river that's still left over from that state. And there's a lot more physical remnants. That's kind of cool. You can still see them here now. I've already forgotten what the new question was.
- [29:56]
B
Rambling about the other things, I forgot the question to hang on. It'll come to me. The end of the First Bulgarian Empire.
- [30:06]
C
So, you know, studying kind of Islamic history, I'm sure you're very familiar with this phenomenon of, you know, the Roman Empire and then later the Byzantine Empire, particularly the Eastern Roman Empire, always face this challenge of threats from the east and threats from the West. And it was a constant balancing act. And, you know, for The Bulgarians often, you know, the fact that, you know, the Islamic empires and things off to the east were occasionally fighting with the Byzantines. This was a saving grace that repeatedly would kind of give them breathing room. However, you know, over time, the first Bulgarian Empire, you know, got a little bit weaker. There was, you know, right after the conversion to Christianity, two things happened. One, hermitism became very popular. So you had a lot of people kind of detaching from society. Famously, Ivan Avrila, who's the patron saint of Bulgaria, did this. And so that kind of, you know, that element of Christianity started to kind of undermine the state. And a lot of people were, like, wanting to go away into monasteries and not really participate. But the bigger problem was the Bogamils, and this was a kind of heretical sect of Christianity that went even further and that basically said the physical world is evil. The. The physical world should not be sort of interacted with. We should just sort of be detached and aesthetics and this kind of thing. And there's no reason to pay taxes, no reason to have children. There's no reason to really engage with the world at all. And this got its start in Bulgaria. It has its own crazy story because it eventually, over the course of several centuries, makes its way into, like, France and even a bit into England. And French and English kings, particularly in France, fight a whole series of wars to eradicate these people. Because you can imagine from the perspective of a. Of a state ruler, you are not a fan of this religion because, you know, you definitely want people to pay their taxes and have kids and participate in society. So these things started to weaken the first Bulgarian state. But then the Byzantines did one of their classic moves and kind of invited someone from kind of the steppe areas in what's now Ukraine to attack Bulgaria. But this time it was not just the Pechenegs or Cumans and any of these groups. It was the Kievan Rus. And they came and absolutely smashed the first Bulgarian Empire, defeated them very soundly. And in fact, the Byzantines basically freaked out at this point because this is not what they wanted. They wanted the Kievan Rus to come and, like, distract and kind of weaken Bulgaria, but instead, their leader Sviatoslav defeated them and said, I like it here. I think this is going to be my new capital. I'm just going to set up shop here. And the Byzantines are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, dad, we did not want you to replace the Bulgarians and become a new threat on our border. And so they ended up kind of almost Working with the Bulgarians to help defeat and kind of kick out the Kievan Rus. But still this process just utterly destroyed the, the first Bulgarian Empire. And after that there's a kind of remnant that popped up in what's now Macedonia and a new family, a new dynasty sort of arose there and continued on for another several decades. And that Tsar Samuel, who kind of declared himself the new tsar now that the royal family was like taken into captivity, minor side point. It's very funny what happened to the royal family, this, you know, long lived dynasty. And there are two remaining sons, they're taken into Byzantine captivity after the defeat of the state, one of them is turned into a eunuch. So no kids coming from there. The other one, eventually, after Samuel declares himself to be the new ruler and kind of reestablishes Bulgaria, the Byzantines are like, why don't we let them back into Bulgaria? Because they'll probably start a civil war. And so the two brothers that are kind of the remnants of the dynasty, they walk up to the border and the story is that some border guard, because they were wearing Byzantine clothes, they'd been captives for years, shot him with an arrow, just thought he was some Byzantine guy and killed him. And so that was the end of the dynasty, a very ignominious end. But so, so you then you get this like rump Bulgarian state and essentially it carried on for decades. But the Byzantines were able to create a really nice generous peace treaty with the Arabs and that enabled them to campaign against the Bulgarians every year for something like 15 years. Which, as you know, in medieval history, that is an insane. To take your army and enter your opponent's territory and take fortresses and really campaign every single year for over a decade is very rare. And it took a tremendous determination. And that's why the, the Byzantine emperor who did that is known as Basil the Bulgar Slayer, that is his official moniker in Byzantine history because he was absolutely ruthless in both, you know, militarily campaigning against the first Bulgarian Empire, what was left of it, and also picking off the, the various family members of the Tsar. It's a very tragic story that a lot of his kids eventually sided with the Byzantines and kind of betrayed him. And eventually there's a story that we have a couple sources on. So it's probably something like this happened, but it's, it's, it's a lot. But there's a famous battle of Klutch where, you know, a Bulgarian army is basically just surrounded and completely captured or destroyed. And the Story is that Basil blinded 99 out of 100 of the soldiers and left the hundredth man with one single eye so he could lead the army back home. And that this would be a kind of burden on the state. You know, it probably didn't have it exactly that way, but. But there are several sources that talk about this, so something like this probably happened. And basically when Samuel, the leader of Bulgaria, saw this, he had a heart attack and died. He was so kind of horrified by this sight. And so, you know, that's the kind of like the final coup de grace. You know, there's a little bit that happens after that, but that's like the real ending. So it's a dramatic story, you could say, wow.
- [36:03]
B
So real soap opera esque twists and turns there. But yeah, classic medieval history. I would expect that.
- [36:11]
C
I always say if there's one guy in Bulgarian history I would most like to see like a miniseries about, it's that guy Samuel. Because his story is just unbelievably tragic and just this grand highest of highs, lowest of lows, just a wild story.
- [36:25]
B
And so you've touched on this a little bit already. But I am just curious what, if any, the kind of legacies of the first Bulgarian Empire are in today's Bulgaria? Because it is just kind of unfathomable to be that there could be so few legacies of that kind of first state. So could you expand on that a little bit more? You know, what we see remaining or what we could maybe kind of trace back to this original state.
- [37:05]
C
So, you know, if you go around Sofia today, there's one or two statues, a few street names, you know, named after some rulers, but not a lot. Now you can go to the ruins of Pliska and Vlika Praslav, the first two, excuse me, capitals of the first Bulgarian Empire. And there's. But it's not a lot left, just some ruins, not terribly grand or anything. There is one kind of interesting thing. It's called the Madara horse rider. And so it's this enormous carving of a man riding a horse with a dog kind of spearing a lion. I think it is, that's carved into a cliff face, that it's on the Bulgarian, like lower denomination of coins. It's about to be on the lower denomination of Euro coins when we switch over to the euro in a month and a half. And that's still there. You can see it. And we kind of think we know when that was made, but it was definitely in the early part, within the first few rulers of the first Bulgarian Empire, I think Omar Tag is the most likely ruler under whose reign it was made. So there's a few things like that. But it's also. It was another reason to write this book that. But, you know, I know when I travel to a place, I love to buy a history book or a novel about that place and kind of read it and enjoy it while I was there. And to me, it seemed like. And, you know, I've met so many people who have visited Bulgaria. It's like, you come and you could travel all around Sofia and you'll see tons of things about Bulgaria's modern history, but you could easily spend days as a tourist around here and not really know anything or hear much of anything about this medieval history. And so, yeah, I was kind of trying to almost correct that because, you know, that medieval history is alluded to sometimes in things. You know, when Bulgaria was a communist state, its kind of seal had 681 as the founding date. That was alluded to. The 13th century kind of anniversary of that founding happened in 1981. And that was a huge event for the Bulgarian state at the time. And the country is full of gigantic concrete monuments commemorating that. And so, you know, all over the place, you see, if you see a gigantic communist monument, it was almost certainly made in 1981 to commemorate 13 centuries of Bulgarian statehood. So, you know, it has been commemorated like that, but it's still not that well known, not that well commemorated. There aren't a lot of physical, even monuments and things to these rulers around Bulgaria.
- [39:33]
B
Do you think that's just sort of coincidental that relatively few remains from this period still exist? Or was there any kind of, like, deliberate attempt at effacing some of that history or kind of rewriting the narrative of Bulgarian history or maybe a bit of both?
- [39:57]
C
Yeah, very much the latter. I mean, so there's a chapter in my book that I love the title of it, if I remember it exactly right, it's something like, like Nazis versus Communists versus geneticists versus the tourism board. And it's one of these basic questions of who were these first Bulgarians? What was their kind of ethnic makeup? Because, you know, for a brief time, Bulgaria was basically at the bullet, or I'd say at the barrel of a gun, was an ally of the Germans in the Second World War. And during that time, the story was, ah, these proto Bulgarians were so strong, they subjugated the Slavs. And so that's why even though the Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, they're cool. They can be our allies because really their ancestors were like the, the dominators of the Slavs, just as we wish to be. And so don't think too much about it. Then when Bulgaria becomes, you know, a communist satellite state, suddenly it's like, oh, the, the proto Bulgarians were a tiny, tiny, nearly insignificant group. They don't really matter. What really matters is the Slavs and Bulgarians are really just, you know, Russian Slavic brothers. And then now, you know, genetic research is starting to come into that. And then, you know, in the later 20th century, we started learning all this stuff about the Thracians, which we really didn't know almost anything about before. And so Thracians became very in vogue and very cool. Bulgaria's got all kinds of incredible Thracian treasures and tombs and things like that. And so suddenly lots and lots of people telling the story suddenly said, ah, we're the descendants of the Thracians. Which, I mean, I'm sure there's some, you know, the Thracians did live here, but there's no, no good evidence for a kind of direct connection. But, you know, this story kept changing over and over and over due to the politics of the time. And for me, it's probably something in the middle that, you know, there might have been like 40,000 or so of those proto Bulgarians, but we're not really that sure. There were definitely a lot more Slavs, but, you know, it's, it's more complicated than any of those. But still, that's, it's a heavily politicized story, and I would say that. But the less. The kind of lesser emphasis on the first Bulgarian empire is also a legacy of Russian kind of influence during the communist period. Because, you know, when I look around Sofia, there's a million monuments to Russians and to Russian things and not many to Bulgarian things, because, you know, that, that could be a whole other 45 minute conversation. But, you know, the, the Russophilia, Russophobia, that has been a very fundamental kind of, of cleavage and battle within Bulgarian culture and politics for well over a century. And so you kind of see that played out. And oftentimes that modern sort of fight and debate eclipses this kind of older history. And the older history feels like it just sort of gets left to the side.
- [42:44]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining me and for shedding some light on the very complicated and also understudied, understood period and place in history. So thank you so much for coming on to talk to me about it. I learned a lot and I'm sure listeners did as well.
- [43:11]
C
Yeah. And if listeners are interested in picking it up, I'll note quickly. I did very much design the book so that it could be used by academics and students. You know, there's all the footnotes, all the citations, but the narrative itself is very much written to be just an enjoyable read for the everyday person. So that was one of my main goals, to kind of strike that balance. So if someone's interested in using this for, like, their research or just to, you know, have as a reference, I think it's a great use for that. But it's also just a fun read.
- [43:38]
B
Amazing. Thank you so much.